The setup here would be familiar to fans of zombie movies: a cross-section of townspeople get shut up someplace (grocery store) while outside, something wants to eat them. Then they try to decide what to do, and fight, and get eaten and stuff. In this case there is also a thick, unnatural fog lending a gothic mysteriousness to the question of what, exactly, is out there waiting to eat our hapless protagonists.

It's a pretty sure-fire formula, and some of the scenes where people get eaten/bit/tentacled/infected by a zillion alien spiders work very well. There's a grisly Lovecraftian splendor to the monsters that makes for lovely horrific images. The movie successfully creates a sense that, as you go deeper and deeper into the mist, there is always something more strange and horrible waiting to be encountered.

I do have to give Darabont props for having the monsters act plausibly like animals. Too often, creature-threat movies cheat by having the creatures display a human-like, but malevolent, intelligence. In this case they really are just animals. Horrible, alien, deadly, gigantic animals.

Which makes them only slightly stupider than the humans.

It has been a long time since I read the novella, and my memory of it is foggy (ha-ha) but many online reviews claim that it is "very faithful" and the dialog is lifted straight out of King's own writing. If that is true... well, I think, perhaps, maybe, it wasn't some of his strongest dialog.

Or, maybe it's just the kind of dialog that works on a page, but doesn't translate well to being acted out. It ends up being clunky, implausible, and terribly overstated. People are given to making grand pronouncements about the nature of humanity when they really should be talking about how to fight monsters. And the timing on most of the dialog seems consistently off -- even when people are arguing angrily with each other there are long pauses between each person's lines, and there's very little of the kind of talking over each other that feels more natural in a stressful situation.

Thomas Jane's delivery as the protagonist is especially flat and unconvincing.

Many of the scenes are staged in such a way that, when a given character or element is not involved with the immediate story, they seem to disappear, then reappear when they are needed again.

Thrillers always have people doing things that turn out to be stupid -- they have to, otherwise the plot wouldn't move forward. But the best thrillers also have dialog, action, and pacing that make it comprehensible why a certain stupid action would seem, to a certain character, like a good idea at the time.

In The Mist, too often the stupid things people do seem arbitrary, contrived, and inconsistent. One minute Our Hero is the one telling everyone to stay inside the store or they're going to get eaten by monsters, the next minute he's leading a charge across the parking lot to the pharmacy in order to get burn treatment items for a man who is 1. Almost certain to die anyway, and, 2. Begging them to shoot him. So it just feels like "oh, they're doing that now because the plot requires it."

Not only do they do stupid things for arbitrary reasons, but their immediate reaction to threats seems stupid even for people in a horror movie. They spend an awful lot of time standing around simply gawping at things that are about to kill them, and seem ridiculously slow on the uptake for certain things like "giant bugs attracted to light! turn off lights now! seriously, turn off lights now! now! no, don't turn on those other lights! turn them off! turn them off! why isn't anybody yelling at you to turn them off? why aren't you turning them off? no, don't light a fire, what the hell, fire makes light! is the mist depriving your brains of oxygen or something? turn off the damn lights!"

The stupid thing that bugged me most, because of the completely tone-deaf "let's make sure to kill the black guy early" aspect of it, was when the lead protagonist's obnoxious black lawyer neighbor absolutely refuses to believe that there are monsters in the fog. Not only that, but he concludes that the whole thing is obviously some kind of joke that is being played on him. And he is so sure of this that he refuses to go look at a genuine tentacle fragment that would disprove his joke-on-me theory. Then he leads a little band of what he calls "my people" (notably including most of the black denizens of the supermarket) off to what the audience knows is certain death in the fog.

In theory, years of neighborly conflict erupting under a condition of extreme stress seems like a good story element. But in this movie, the neighbor's position just doesn't come across as believable. I found myself thinking "Playing a joke? That's really the best you could come up with?" Especially since we see the tentacle fragment deliquescing after it's poked with a stick, why couldn't we have the neighbor come look at it only to find that it already turned to goo? Wouldn't that have been more plausible, and also funnier?

Speaking of funnier, another problem I had with this movie was that I was never sure if the scenes and dialog that came across as funny were actually supposed to be funny. Intentional or not, I did laugh out loud a few times -- though not enough to make me recommend the movie for that alone. (Unlike the nearly Ed Wood levels of crazy hilarious stupidity found in King adaptation Dreamcatcher.)

Getting rid of the neighbor so early means that the only person our protagonist has to fight with (other than mist-monsters) for the remaining 90 minutes is the crazy religious fanatic. Which means there's no debate about course of action between different, but not-insane factions. The stupid things done by Our Heroes -- no matter how stupid -- become the only sane choice by default.

This leads to an irony that, again, I could not tell was intentional. The crazy religious fanatic's recommended course of action (sans the human sacrifice) turns out to be correct.